[152] But what a talk there will be! How loud the blast of evil rumour! “What harm in that?” you will say: “better keep my peapods for myself than have the praises of the whole country-side if I am to have but a small farm and a miserable crop.” Yes; and no doubt you will escape disease and weakness, you will have no sorrow, no trouble, you will have long and ever happier days, if only you are sole possessor of as many acres of good land as the Roman people tilled in the days of Tatius. In later times, Romans broken with old age, who had fought in the Punic battles or against the dread Pyrrhus or the swords of the Molossians, received at last, in return for all their wounds, a scanty two acres of land. None ever deemed such recompense too small for their service of toil and blood; none spoke of a shabby, thankless country. A little plot like that would feed the father himself and the crowd at the cottage where lay the wife in childbed, with four little ones playing around — one slave-born, three the master’s own; for their big brothers, on their return from ditch or furrow, a second and ampler supper of porridge would be smoking in a lordly dish. To-day we don’t think such a plot of ground big enough for our garden!
[173] It is here mostly that lies the cause of crime. No human passion has mingled more poison-bowls, none has more often wielded the murderous dagger, than the fierce craving for unbounded wealth. For the man who wants wealth must have it at once; what respect for laws, what fear, what sense of shame is to be found in a miser hurrying to be rich? “Live content, my boys, with these cottages and hills of yours,” said the Marsian or Hernican or Vestinian father in the days of yore; “let the plough win for us what bread shall suffice our table; such fare the rustic Gods approve, whose aid and bounty gave us the glad ear of corn, and taught man to disdain the acorn of ancient times. The man who is not ashamed to wear high boots in time of frost, and who keeps off the East wind with skins turned inwards, will never wish to do a forbidden thing; it is purple raiment, whatever it be, foreign and unknown to us, that leads to crime and wickedness.”
[189] Such were the maxims which those ancients taught the young; but now, when autumn days are over, the father rouses his sleeping son after midnight with a shout: “Awake, boy, and take your tablets; scribble away and get up your cases; read through the red-lettered laws of our forefathers, or send in a petition for a centurion’s vine-staff. See that Laelius notes your uncombed head and hairy nostrils, and admires your broad shoulders; destroy the huts of the Moors and the forts of the Brigantes, that your sixtieth year may bring you the eagle that will make you rich. Or if you are too lazy to endure the weary labours of the camp, if the sound of horn and trumpet melts your soul within you, buy something that you can sell at half as much again; feel no disgust at a trade that must be banished to the other side of the Tiber; make no distinction between hides and unguents: the smell of gain is good whatever the thing from which it comes. Let this maxim be ever on your lips, a saying worthy of the Gods, and of Jove himself if he turned poet: ‘No matter whence the money comes, but money you must have.’” These are the lessons taught by skinny old nurses to little boys before they can walk; this is what every girl learns before her ABC!
[210] To any father urging precepts such as these I would say this: “Tell me, O emptiest of men, who bids you hurry? The disciple, I warrant you, will outstrip his master. You may leave him with an easy mind; you will be outdone as surely as Telamon was beaten by Ajax, or Peleus by Achilles. Be gentle with the young; their bones are not yet filled up with the marrow of ripe wickedness. When the lad begins to comb a beard, and apply to its length the razor’s edge, he will give false testimony, he will sell his perjuries for a trifling sum, touching the altar and the foot of Ceres all the time. If your daughter-in-law brings a deadly dowry into the house, you may count her as already dead and buried. What a grip of fingers will throttle her in her sleep! For the wealth which you think should be hunted for over land and sea, your son will acquire by a shorter road; great crimes demand no labour. Some day you will say, ‘I never taught these things, I never advised them’: no, but you are yourself the cause and origin of your son’s depravity; for whosoever teaches the love of wealth turns his sons into misers by his ill-omened instruction. When he shows him how to double his patrimony by fraud, he gives him his head, and throws a free rein over the car; try to call him back, and he cannot stop: he will pay no heed to you, he will rush on, leaving the turning-post far behind. No man is satisfied with sinning just as far as you permit: so much greater is the license which they allow themselves!
[235] “When you tell a youth that a man is a fool who makes a present to a friend, or relieves and lightens the poverty of a kinsman, you teach him to plunder and to cheat and to commit any kind of crime for money’s sake, the love of which is as great in you as was love of their country in the hearts of the Decii, or in that of Menoeceus, if Greece speaks true for Thebes — that country in whose furrows armed legions sprang into life out of dragons’ teeth, taking straightway to grim battle as though a bugler had also risen up along with them. Thus you will see the fire, whose sparks you yourself have kindled, blazing far and wide and carrying all before them. Nor will you yourself, poor wretch, meet with any mercy; the pupil lion, with a loud roar, will devour the trembling instructor in his den. Your nativity, you say, is known to the astrologers: but it is a tedious thing to wait for the slow-running spindle, and you will die before your thread is snapped. You are already in your son’s way; you are delaying his prayers; your long and stag-like old age is a torment to the young man. Seek out Archigenes at once; buy some of the mixture of Mithridates; if you wish to pluck one more fig, and gather roses once again, you should have some medicament to be swallowed before dinner by one who is both a father and a king.”
[256] I am showing you the choicest of diversions, one with which no theatre, no show of a grand Praetor can compare, if you will observe at what a risk to life men increase their fortunes, become possessors of full brass-bound treasure-chests, or of the cash which must be deposited with watchful Castor, ever since Mars the Avenger lost his helmet and failed to protect his own effects. So you may give up all the performances of Flora, of Ceres, and of Cybele; so much finer are the games of human life. Is there more pleasure to be got from gazing at men hurled from a spring-board, or tripping down a tight rope, than from yourself — you who spend your whole life in a Corycian ship, ever tossed by the wind from North or South, a poor contemptible trafficker in stinking wares, finding your joy in importing sweet wine from the shores of ancient Crete, or flagons that were fellow-citizens of Jove? Yet the man who plants his steps with balanced foot gains his livelihood thereby; that rope keeps him from cold and hunger; while you run the risk for the sake of a thousand talents or a hundred mansions. Look at our ports, our seas, crowded with big ships! The men at sea now outnumber those on shore. Whithersoever hope of gain shall call, thither fleets will come; not content with bounding over the Carpathian and Gaetulian seas, they will leave Calpe far behind, and hear the sun hissing in the Herculean main. It is well worth while, no doubt, to have beheld the monsters of the deep and the young mermen of the Ocean that you may return home with tight-stuffed purse, and exult in your swollen money-bags!
[284] Not all men are possessed with one form of madness. One madman in his sister’s arms is terrified by the faces and fire of the Furies; another, when he strikes down an ox, believes that it is Agamemnon or the Ithacan that is bellowing. The man who loads his ship up to the gunwale with goods, with only a plank between him and the deep, is in need of a keeper, though he keep his hands off his shirt and his cloak, seeing that he endures all that misery and all that danger for the sake of bits of silver cut up into little images and inscriptions! Should clouds and thunder threaten, “Let go!” cries the merchant who has bought up corn or pepper, “that black sky, this dark wrack, are nought — it is but summer lightning.” Poor wretch! on this very night perchance he will be cast out amid broken timbers and engulfed by the waves, clutching his purse with his left hand or his teeth
. The man for whose desires yesterday not all the gold which Tagus and the ruddy Pactolus rolls along would have sufficed, must now content himself with a rag to cover his cold and nakedness, and a poor morsel of food, while he begs for pennies as a shipwrecked mariner, and supports himself by a painted storm!
[303] Wealth gotten with such woes is preserved by fears and troubles that are greater still; it is misery to have the guardianship of a great fortune. The millionaire Licinus orders a troop of slaves to be on the watch all night with fire buckets in their places, being anxious for his amber, his statues and Phrygian marbles, his ivory and plaques of tortoise-shell. The nude Cynic fears no fire for his tub; if broken, he will make himself a new house to-morrow, or repair it with clamps of lead. When Alexander beheld in that tub its mighty occupant, he felt how much happier was the man who had no desires than he who claimed for himself the entire world, with perils before him as great as his achievements. Had we but wisdom, thou wouldst have no Divinity, O Fortune: it is we that make thee into a Goddess!
[316] Yet if any should ask of me what measure of fortune is enough, I will tell him: as much as thirst, cold and hunger demand; as much as sufficed you, Epicurus, in your little garden; as much as in earlier days was to be found in the house of Socrates. Never does Nature say one thing and Wisdom another. Do the limits within which I confine you seem too severe? Then throw in something from our own manners; make up a sum as big as that which Otho’s law deems worthy of the fourteen rows. If that also knits your brow, and makes you thrust out your lip, take a couple of knights, or make up thrice four hundred thousand sesterces! If your lap is not yet full, if it is still opening for more, then neither the wealth of Croesus, nor that of the Persian Monarchs, will suffice you, nor yet that of Narcissus, on whom Claudius Caesar lavished everything, and whose orders he obeyed when bidden to slay his wife.
Satire 15. An Egyptian Atrocity
[1] Who knows not, O Bithynian Volusius, what monsters demented Egypt worships? One district adores the crocodile, another venerates the Ibis that gorges itself with snakes. In the place where magic chords are sounded by the truncated Memnon, and ancient hundred-gated Thebes lies in ruins, men worship the glittering golden image of the long-tailed ape. In one part cats are worshipped, in another a river fish, in another whole townships venerate a dog; none adore Diana, but it is an impious outrage to crunch leeks and onions with the teeth. What a holy race to have such divinities springing up in their gardens! No animal that grows wool may appear upon the dinner-table; it is forbidden there to slay the young of the goat; but it is lawful to feed on the flesh of man! When Ulysses told a tale like this over the dinner-table to the amazed Alcinous, he stirred some to wrath, some perhaps to laughter, as a lying story-teller. “What?” one would say, “will no one hurl this fellow into the sea, who merits a terrible and a true Charybdis with his inventions of monstrous Laestrygones and Cyclopes? For I could sooner believe in Scylla, and the clashing Cyanean rocks, and skins full of storms, or in the story how Circe, by a gentle touch, turned Elpenor and his comrades into grunting swine. Did he deem the Phaeacians people so devoid of brains?” So might some one have justly spoken who was not yet tipsy, and had taken but a small drink of wine from the Corcyraean bowl, for the Ithacan’s tale was all his own, with none to bear him witness.
[27] I will now relate strange deeds done of late in the consulship of Juncus, beyond the walls of broiling Coptus; a crime of the common herd, worse than any crime of the tragedians; for though you turn over all the tales of long-robed Tragedy from the days of Pyrrha onwards, you will find there no crime committed by an entire people. But hear what an example of ruthless barbarism has been displayed in these days of ours.
[33] Between the neighbouring towns of Ombi and Tentyra there burns an ancient and long-cherished feud and undying hatred, whose wounds are not to be healed. Each people is filled with fury against the other because each hates its neighbours’ Gods, deeming that none can be held as deities save its own. So when one of these peoples held a feast, the chiefs and leaders of their enemy thought good to seize the occasion, so that their foe might not enjoy a glad and merry day, with the delight of grand banquets, with tables set out at every temple and every crossway, and with night-long feasts, and with couches spread all day and all night, and sometimes discovered by the sun upon the seventh morn. Egypt, doubtless, is a rude country; but in indulgence, so far as I myself have noted, its barbarous rabble yields not to the ill-famed Canopus. Victory too would be easy, it was thought, over men steeped in wine, stuttering and stumbling in their cups. On the one side were men dancing to a swarthy piper, with unguents, such as they were, and flowers and chaplets on their heads; on the other side, a ravenous hate. First come loud words, as preludes to the fray: these serve as a trumpet-call to their hot passions; then shout answering shout, they charge. Bare hands do the fell work of war. Scarce a cheek is left without a gash; scarce one nose, if any, comes out of the battle unbroken. Through all the ranks might be seen battered faces, and features other than they were; bones gaping through torn cheeks, and fists dripping with blood from eyes. Yet the combatants deem themselves at play and waging a boyish warfare because there are no corpses on which to trample. What avails a mob of so many thousand brawlers if no lives are lost? So fiercer and fiercer grows the fight; they now search the ground for stones — the natural weapons of civic strife — and hurl them with bended arms against the foe: not such stones as Turnus or Ajax flung, or like that with which the son of Tydeus struck Aeneas on the hip, but such as may be cast by hands unlike to theirs, and born in these days of ours. For even in Homer’s day the race of man was on the wane; earth now produces none but weak and wicked men that provoke such Gods as see them to laughter and to loathing.
[72] To come back from our digression: the one side, reinforced, boldly draws the sword and renews the fight with showers of arrows; the dwellers in the shady palm-groves of neighbouring Tentyra turn their backs in headlong flight before the Ombite charge. Hereupon one of them, over-afraid and hurrying, tripped and was caught; the conquering host cut up his body into a multitude of scraps and morsels, that one dead man might suffice for everyone, and devoured it bones and all. There was no stewing of it in boiling pots, no roasting upon spits; so slow and tedious they thought it to wait for a fire, that they contented themselves with the corpse uncooked!
[84] One may here rejoice that no outrage was done to the flame that Prometheus stole from the highest heavens, and gifted to the earth. I felicitate the element, and doubt not that you are pleased; but never was flesh so relished as by those who endured to put that carcase between their teeth. For in that act of gross wickedness, do not doubt or ask whether it was only the first gullet that enjoyed its meal; for when the whole body had been consumed, those who stood furthest away actually dragged their fingers along the ground and so got some smack of the blood.
[93] The Vascones, fame tells us, once prolonged their lives by such food as this; but their case was different. Unkindly fortune had brought on them the last dire extremity of war, the famine of a long siege. In a plight like that of the people just named, resorting to such food deserves our pity, inasmuch as not till they had consumed every herb, every living thing, and everything else to which the pangs of an empty belly drove them — not till their very enemies pitied their pale, lean and wasted limbs — did hunger make them tear the limbs of other men, being ready to feed even upon their own. What man, what God, would withhold a pardon from bellies which had suffered such dire straits, and which might look to be forgiven by the Manes of those whose bodies they were devouring? To us, indeed, Zeno gives better teaching, for he permits some things, though not indeed all things, to be done for the saving of life; but how could a Cantabrian be a Stoic, and that too in the days of old Metellus? To-day the whole world has its Greek and its Roman Athens; eloquent Gaul has trained the pleaders of Britain, and distant Thule talks of hiring a rhetorician. Yet the people I have named were a noble people; and the people of Zacynthos,
their equals in bravery and honour, their more than equals in calamity, offer a like excuse. But Egypt is more savage than the Maeotid altar; for if we may hold the poet’s tales as true, the foundress of that accursed Tauric rite does but slay her victims; they have nought further or more terrible than the knife to fear. But what calamity drove these Egyptians to the deed? What extremity of hunger, what beleaguering army, compelled them to so monstrous and infamous a crime?
Delphi Complete Works of Juvena Page 12